The problem is, I have ATT U-verse for DSL service. That means I have only 1 wall outlet paired to enable the 11MB/s download, that means the router has to be there. Not sure where I would have to place the antenna for good reception, but I would imagine that the ethernet cable from the HDHR would be as long as the coax, so no benefit (and you would have to have an outlet near the antenna). I already stream wirelessly to the aTV.

But I do appreciate all the suggestions.

I understand, but there is a way.

In my setup I use the Uverse modem to pass through the connection to my Airport Modem - I do not use the Uverse box as a router. I then hang an ethernet switch onto my Airport and the HDHR onto the switch.
Yes there is an ethernet cable to the switch (and power), but then you have access to the HDHR anywhere in the house with no additional cable.
Not sure if this will help in your case, just a suggestion.

You could use a Windows 7 or 8 computer with the Windows Media Center software to do the TV recording, and that will work with the HDHomeRun Prime w/cablecard, allowing you to record more than just the local networks (which is all you'll tune in with ClearQAM). Then, add to that the Plex Media Server app which will do on-the-fly transcoding of your HDTV shows (which are in MPEG-2 format) to your iOS devices running the Plex client app. With an un-jailbroken Apple TV, you can use your iPhone/iPad's AirPlay feature to stream the video to that.

For live TV on your iPhone/iPad, you can use the app InstaTV (no pause/rewind functionality, just live TV).

I just bought a base-model 2012 Mac Mini which I'm thinking about setting up a Boot Camp Windows 7 partition on so that I can use this as my replacement Windows Media Center server (my current box is more powerful, but it's a very large HP tower, so I'm thinking about replacing it with the Mini). Now that my household has become more and more entrenched in the Apple ecosystem, I'd prefer a Mac OS solution, but as others have mentioned, eyeTV is behind the times in not supporting the HDHomeRun Prime cablecard tuner and it sounds like Windows Media Center might be more problem-free in general.

If you want to have your TV shows automatically converted to MP4 format in the middle of the night, or whenever, you can do that as well using some other apps, but I find that I watch a show and then delete it, rather than archive them for the future, so the on-the-fly transcoding approach works fine for me. Truth be told, I don't really do a lot of TV watching on my iPhone/iPad/AppleTV around the house as I also have XBox 360's in a couple of rooms and I can use those as "extenders" to play live TV and recorded shows streamed from my Windows Media Center computer (no transcoding necessary). But I anticipate doing a bit more TV watching with the iPad as my wife and I get into an exercising routine, as the room with the exercise equipment doesn't have a TV. Also it can come in handy if we're in bed and one of us is watching something on the TV that the other person doesn't like. Just fire up the iPad, put on the headphones, and watch your own thing.

So here's my plan-- We have DirecTV right now, but our contract ends this summer. I figured I would just replace the satellite dish with an outdoor antenna and attach the coax that had been running to the dish to this antenna instead. Then I'll connect the antenna's coax which runs into the house to the HDHR. The HDHR will be connected to our AEBS. We plan to use EyeTV on our 2011 MBP (upgraded internal hd to 1tb; 8gb of ram) to transcode and then import videos to iTunes for viewing on our two ATV3s.

Will this work?

Yes absolutely this will work just fine. It's pretty much exactly what I've been doing for the past year and a half. Your plan is good and it has been tested and is in use by others. Go forth!

Now: One finer point to consider after you've got it set up and working:

The location where EyeTV stores its exports to iTunes is a little funny. There's no place in EyeTV to specify where you want it to actually store the exported .m4v file. (You CAN tell it where you want it to store the original, uncompressed EyeTV recordings. Just not the exported iTunes files.)

This means it's hard to get EyeTV to store the transcoded recordings on an external hard drive alone, even if that's where your iTunes library resides. Weird, I know. Especially since most folks would want to store the exported files on an external hard drive to preserve space on the precious internal drive.

The way I got around this was with AppleScripts. You can put an AppleScript in EyeTV's directories that tell it to export a show when it is finished recording, and to store it on an external drive, AND to "add" it to iTunes' library WITHOUT copying the file into the iTunes Library folder. My own iTunes library is stored on my internal drive, but my exported EyeTV shows are stored on a spacious external drive thanks to this script. To avoid double-storage, you should un-check the "export" option for your EyeTV smart guides, since the applescript will just auto-export every recording, whether that checkbox is clicked or not. I'm at work now and don't have easy access to my home machine, but I can copy-paste the applescript I used to do this later. (You'll likely find other applescript solutions for this type of thing if you google around. EyeTV is pretty customizable via AppleScript.)

Quote:

Originally Posted by GarrettL1979

Also, will our MBP need to be connected via ethernet to the AEBS or will wifi work? I'd rather not have to keep it connected.

Wifi should work. It's only the HDHR that needs to be physically wired to your router. Any computer running EyeTV (or Windows Media Center) that connects to your local network can receive the tuner streams from the HDHR, whether that computer is connected via ethernet OR wireless. This is how Silicon Dust advertises the capability of the HDHR.http://www.silicondust.com/products/hdhomerun/atsc/

What happens is you open up EyeTV for the first time on your mac and it will scan your local network for EyeTV-compatible tuners. It will find the HDHR and connect to it. Wired or wireless, it shouldn't matter.

That said, I've always used my system with my mac wired to the router. So I can't comment on how WELL it works when only using wireless. I'd expect that the quality of your recorded EyeTV shows could potentially be affected if your wifi signal is spotty at the location of your mac. But as long as you have a strong signal where your mac is, you should be just fine.

Yes absolutely this will work just fine. It's pretty much exactly what I've been doing for the past year and a half. Your plan is good and it has been tested and is in use by others. Go forth!

Now: One finer point to consider after you've got it set up and working:

The location where EyeTV stores its exports to iTunes is a little funny. There's no place in EyeTV to specify where you want it to actually store the exported .m4v file. (You CAN tell it where you want it to store the original, uncompressed EyeTV recordings. Just not the exported iTunes files.)

This means it's hard to get EyeTV to store the transcoded recordings on an external hard drive alone, even if that's where your iTunes library resides. Weird, I know. Especially since most folks would want to store the exported files on an external hard drive to preserve space on the precious internal drive.

The way I got around this was with AppleScripts. You can put an AppleScript in EyeTV's directories that tell it to export a show when it is finished recording, and to store it on an external drive, AND to "add" it to iTunes' library WITHOUT copying the file into the iTunes Library folder. My own iTunes library is stored on my internal drive, but my exported EyeTV shows are stored on a spacious external drive thanks to this script. To avoid double-storage, you should un-check the "export" option for your EyeTV smart guides, since the applescript will just auto-export every recording, whether that checkbox is clicked or not. I'm at work now and don't have easy access to my home machine, but I can copy-paste the applescript I used to do this later. (You'll likely find other applescript solutions for this type of thing if you google around. EyeTV is pretty customizable via AppleScript.)

Wifi should work. It's only the HDHR that needs to be physically wired to your router. Any computer running EyeTV (or Windows Media Center) that connects to your local network can receive the tuner streams from the HDHR, whether that computer is connected via ethernet OR wireless. This is how Silicon Dust advertises the capability of the HDHR.http://www.silicondust.com/products/hdhomerun/atsc/

What happens is you open up EyeTV for the first time on your mac and it will scan your local network for EyeTV-compatible tuners. It will find the HDHR and connect to it. Wired or wireless, it shouldn't matter.

That said, I've always used my system with my mac wired to the router. So I can't comment on how WELL it works when only using wireless. I'd expect that the quality of your recorded EyeTV shows could potentially be affected if your wifi signal is spotty at the location of your mac. But as long as you have a strong signal where your mac is, you should be just fine.

Thank you so much! I actually moved our iTunes library to an external drive, so I could use the internal drive for EyeTV recordings. Anyways, since it sounds like the new HDHR will have a built in transcoding capability, I might just wait until this summer when it's released. That way EyeTV doesn't have to transcode the uncompressed files transmitted over wifi.

Anyways, since it sounds like the new HDHR will have a built in transcoding capability, I might just wait until this summer when it's released. That way EyeTV doesn't have to transcode the uncompressed files transmitted over wifi.

Wow! I hadn't heard that, but am happy to see it is true:

"In comes two new network tuners, the HDHR4-US and the HDHR4-CC. Both offer hardware transcoding for "digital-to-digital conversion of high-bandwidth MPEG2 streams to bandwidth-friendly H.264." The primary difference between the two new models is one has a CableCARD slot for recording four HD premium channels at once, and the other has dual clear QAM or ATSC tuners -- there is also a third unit, HDHR4-DT2, for Europe and Australia."

-EyeTV would need to update its software to support ingesting/dealing with H.264 instead of the uncompressed MPEG-2, which is what it works with currently. I don't know how big a deal that kind of change is, but in my experience ElGato is kind of slow with their updates. So I wouldn't be surprised if EyeTV doesn't support the new HDHR4 for a while, which would be frustrating for mac users.

At the time I purchased my HDHR3 a couple years ago, ElGato was selling them bundled with EyeTV software. But ElGato has not endorsed Silicon Dust's HDHR products for about a year now. And they sell their own tuner products as well (which are inferior to HDHR, in my opinion).

I would love for more options on the mac in addition to EyeTV.

I do remember reading something about plugins that allow you to access the HDHomerun stream directly in XBMC or Plex. I actually installed and tried to use the XBMC plugin on my jailbroken ATV2. But I couldn't get it to work. Probably because ATV2's buffer storage is not big enough to handle the MPEG-2 stream. But if that stream is now H.264, that may make it do-able. Could enable an end-run around EyeTV entirely?

According to the devs at SiliconDust, the new boxes which do on-the-fly transcoding to h264 should work with Windows Media Center as-is. Apparently there are already cable companies transmitting some TV shows in h264 (vs MPEG-2) and WMC already supports it. That may be true of EyeTV as well. Of course, EyeTV does not currently support encrypted channels (no cablecard support), so that's a separate concern.

If you haven't tried WMC, it's actually very, very good. I have an HP tower with Intel i7 chip running WMC and Plex Media Server, and it does a great job of on-the-fly transcoding to Plex clients. Unfortunately, Plex does not support live TV / DVR functionality from the client side, so you have to wait until a show has recorded before you can watch it on a Plex client.

There is another iOS app called InstaTV which actually will play the HDHomeRun Prime MPEG-2 streams directly on an iPhone/iPad without any transcoding at all (amazingly enough). It's a bit flakey, but can confirm that it does work. No pause/rewind functionality, though...just live TV.

There is another iOS app called InstaTV which actually will play the HDHomeRun Prime MPEG-2 streams directly on an iPhone/iPad without any transcoding at all (amazingly enough). It's a bit flakey, but can confirm that it does work. No pause/rewind functionality, though...just live TV.

This app was just updated on 2/8. With the new update, it is MUCH less flakey!!

I have now received that new transcoding HDHR device and am experimenting with it to replace my HDHR3 Dual unit.

-EyeTV does not support it, but others on the silicon dust forums have said they can get EyeTV to recognize the new device (the "HD Homerun Plus"). However, I did not have success with that when I tried it last night. Have an open question to silicon dust on how to get EyeTV to see it.

-It is possible to manually record a channel from the PLUS using its onboard transcoding capability using the terminal: using wget commands like this:

I have now received that new transcoding HDHR device and am experimenting with it to replace my HDHR3 Dual unit.

-EyeTV does not support it, but others on the silicon dust forums have said they can get EyeTV to recognize the new device (the "HD Homerun Plus"). However, I did not have success with that when I tried it last night. Have an open question to silicon dust on how to get EyeTV to see it.

-It is possible to manually record a channel from the PLUS using its onboard transcoding capability using the terminal: using wget commands like this:

Thanks. Since my previous comment I indeed got the HD Homerun Plus working with EyeTV. I have EyeTV auto-export to iTunes so my Apple TVs can access it.

So I'm using an HD Homerun Dual right now but I've been wondering about upgrading to one of the newer units that can send EyeTV h.264 files natively (if I understand everything right). Two questions:
1) How well doe that work? Any hiccups I should be aware of with EyeTV?
2) Does this speed up export to iTunes? I would imagine it would since it's starting out as an h.264 file so there shouldn't be much conversion necessary, but you never know... Right now it exports in less than real-time, i.e., a 30 minute program often takes over 30 minutes to convert and export (though I do have the commercial skip feature running, but I can't imagine that adds all THAT much to the export).

Last edited by DrOct; Jan 27, 2015 at 08:12 PM.
Reason: Clarifying the time it takes to export

So I'm using an HD Homerun Dual right now but I've been wondering about upgrading to one of the newer units that can send EyeTV h.264 files natively (if I understand everything right). Two questions:
1) How well doe that work? Any hiccups I should be aware of with EyeTV?

Been using the HD Homerun Plus (the one with on-board transcoding so that it delivers the video to EyeTV as H.264 video in the first place) successfully for the past 10 months or so.

Does it work? Yes, in that the video ends up in EyeTV in already-transcoded H.264 format. So the HD Homerun device is doing it's job just fine. And Silicondust has decent a decent HTML interface that lets you change settings on the HDHomeRun Plus from a web browser (kinda like you can with most routers). So you can use that interface to change the transcoding settings (essentially just set it to off (non-transcoded mpeg2 video), "heavy" (transcoded H.264 720p with a high bit rate resulting in a bigger file), or "light/mobile" (transcoded H.264 720p with a lower bit rate resulting in a smaller file). The "light/mobile" is supposedly useful if you just want to stream live tv to your smartphone on your home wifi network, but I never do that so mine is set to "heavy".

Quote:

Originally Posted by DrOct

2) Does this speed up export to iTunes? I would imagine it would since it's starting out as an h.264 file so there shouldn't be much conversion necessary, but you never know... Right now it exports in less than real-time, i.e., a 30 minute program often takes over 30 minutes to convert and export (though I do have the commercial skip feature running, but I can't imagine that adds all THAT much to the export).

This was the sole reason I purchased the HD Homerun Plus. I previously had an HDHR3 dual, and was annoyed that my mac (2009 MBP 17", Intel Core 2 Duo 2.8 MHz, 8GB ram) was being tasked so heavily to transcode all that high-def video. On my machine, it would take longer to transcode than the length of the program. So a 1 hour program would take ~1.5 hours to transcode, and of course if I'd recorded two shows at the same time, then it would take at least 3 hours after they had finished recording before they were both finished and ready to watch in iTunes/Apple TV. Obviously if you have a more powerful processor it should take less time for your CPU to transcode, but it is likely still going to be close to the time duration of a recording.

So, does the HD Homerun Plus speed up export to iTunes by pre-transcoding? YES! Now, when I have a pre-transcoded 1-hour HD recording sitting in EyeTV, if I manually click the "720pHD" button (the graphical button that looks like a black Apple TV), that program will "export" to iTunes in less than 3 minutes. I consider 90 minutes reduced to 3 minutes to be a big improvement. At only 3 minutes, EyeTV is obviously not transcoding the video. I think it may be transcoding the audio only (to match iTunes' requirements for audio), and apparently that takes less time than transcoding audio AND video.

Here's the rub: Elgato (the company that makes EyeTV) does not officially support HD Homerun Plus, and has made ZERO effort to accommodate the pre-transcoded recordings. In fact, when I talked to Elgato tech support about this last year, before I'd received my HD Homerun Plus, they said that EyeTV wouldn't even PLAY the H.264 video from HD Homerun Plus. Luckily, they were just plain wrong as EyeTV plays the transcoded recordings just fine. But the point is don't expect ANY helpful support from Elgato for anything coming out of the HD Homerun Plus. They will just say "we don't support that" and that will be that.

I'm telling you this because I've noticed that, on some of my recordings set to "auto-export" to iTunes, I'll come in and find that my mac is doing the same old transcoding it was doing before I had the Plus, taking 1.5 hours to "export" a 1 hour HD recording to iTunes. In other words, even though the recording is already in H.264 format in EyeTV, EyeTV doesn't seem to KNOW that it doesn't need to transcode the video, and so it tasks the computer to do the full transcoding treatment anyway, even though it shouldn't have to. I get this behavior for recordings set to auto-export. When I notice this happening, I click the "cancel" x button to cancel the export. Then I click the manual "720p HD" button that looks like a black Apple TV, and the export now only takes < 3 minutes. But I can't seem to reliably get this "3-minute exporting" to happen on auto-export. I have to manually click that button to get the super-fast exporting. Annoying since I much prefer for the shows to just magically appear on my apple TV so I don't have to go over to the computer to click "export" before hopping in bed or onto the couch to watch a show.

Yes, I know this sounds silly. But this is what I have found consistently, despite several EyeTV software updates over the past year. Basically, the export process must be somehow different for auto-exporting vs. clicking that Apple TV shaped button.

. . .

other hiccups (seemingly unrelated to export speed): I'd say about 10% of the recordings are completely screwed up in some way. Like, for example, the recording will be set for NBC at 9 pm, and the recording will happen and all metadata says it was indeed the show you wanted, but then when you actually view the recording it was on the wrong channel. Weird and annoying, and I have no explanation for it. About 10% of the time.

So. . . does it work? Yes! Are there hiccups? Yes!

The hiccups are annoying but not enough for me to do something drastic like buy a Tivo or pay for cable.

I will say, though, that were I starting from scratch today, I might eschew the HD Homerun--> EyeTV --> iTunes --> Apple TV watching tact and just buy a Channel Master DVR+ for each of my two TVs. I actually have one already for one of my TVs, and it works pretty well. The down side is you need one per TV. The up side is there are no recurring fees. You don't even have to pay for the guide data, like you do for EyeTV ($20/year for TV Guide).

Well that's disappointing... Auto exports are exactly what I want to get working faster. I know walking over to my computer and exporting stuff isn't that big of a burden, but when you get home from work and you just want to see what's available to watch... it's just so much nicer to be able to fire up the AppleTV see what's there, and just start watching.

It's especially disappointing since obviously it _almost_ work totally correctly with EyeTV, so... how much work could it be for them to just get it working properly? (I'm sure the answer is a lot more than I would expect, but it's still gotta be a doable task).

Second question for you: Is 720p the highest resolution it'll support? I mean most of the shows that I watch are in 720p anyway so that's not a huge deal, but I have them coming through an OTA Antenna and some are in 1080i, so it'd be nice to have those come through in their native resolution if possible.

h.264 (and it's ilk) is obviously the future (isn't there some kind of proposal to start switching OTA broadcasts to something like .264 or .265 or something?), get on board Elgato!

Been using the HD Homerun Plus (the one with on-board transcoding so that it delivers the video to EyeTV as H.264 video in the first place) successfully for the past 10 months or so.

Does it work? Yes, in that the video ends up in EyeTV in already-transcoded H.264 format. So the HD Homerun device is doing it's job just fine. And Silicondust has decent a decent HTML interface that lets you change settings on the HDHomeRun Plus from a web browser (kinda like you can with most routers). So you can use that interface to change the transcoding settings (essentially just set it to off (non-transcoded mpeg2 video), "heavy" (transcoded H.264 720p with a high bit rate resulting in a bigger file), or "light/mobile" (transcoded H.264 720p with a lower bit rate resulting in a smaller file). The "light/mobile" is supposedly useful if you just want to stream live tv to your smartphone on your home wifi network, but I never do that so mine is set to "heavy".

This was the sole reason I purchased the HD Homerun Plus. I previously had an HDHR3 dual, and was annoyed that my mac (2009 MBP 17", Intel Core 2 Duo 2.8 MHz, 8GB ram) was being tasked so heavily to transcode all that high-def video. On my machine, it would take longer to transcode than the length of the program. So a 1 hour program would take ~1.5 hours to transcode, and of course if I'd recorded two shows at the same time, then it would take at least 3 hours after they had finished recording before they were both finished and ready to watch in iTunes/Apple TV. Obviously if you have a more powerful processor it should take less time for your CPU to transcode, but it is likely still going to be close to the time duration of a recording.

So, does the HD Homerun Plus speed up export to iTunes by pre-transcoding? YES! Now, when I have a pre-transcoded 1-hour HD recording sitting in EyeTV, if I manually click the "720pHD" button (the graphical button that looks like a black Apple TV), that program will "export" to iTunes in less than 3 minutes. I consider 90 minutes reduced to 3 minutes to be a big improvement. At only 3 minutes, EyeTV is obviously not transcoding the video. I think it may be transcoding the audio only (to match iTunes' requirements for audio), and apparently that takes less time than transcoding audio AND video.

Here's the rub: Elgato (the company that makes EyeTV) does not officially support HD Homerun Plus, and has made ZERO effort to accommodate the pre-transcoded recordings. In fact, when I talked to Elgato tech support about this last year, before I'd received my HD Homerun Plus, they said that EyeTV wouldn't even PLAY the H.264 video from HD Homerun Plus. Luckily, they were just plain wrong as EyeTV plays the transcoded recordings just fine. But the point is don't expect ANY helpful support from Elgato for anything coming out of the HD Homerun Plus. They will just say "we don't support that" and that will be that.

I'm telling you this because I've noticed that, on some of my recordings set to "auto-export" to iTunes, I'll come in and find that my mac is doing the same old transcoding it was doing before I had the Plus, taking 1.5 hours to "export" a 1 hour HD recording to iTunes. In other words, even though the recording is already in H.264 format in EyeTV, EyeTV doesn't seem to KNOW that it doesn't need to transcode the video, and so it tasks the computer to do the full transcoding treatment anyway, even though it shouldn't have to. I get this behavior for recordings set to auto-export. When I notice this happening, I click the "cancel" x button to cancel the export. Then I click the manual "720p HD" button that looks like a black Apple TV, and the export now only takes < 3 minutes. But I can't seem to reliably get this "3-minute exporting" to happen on auto-export. I have to manually click that button to get the super-fast exporting. Annoying since I much prefer for the shows to just magically appear on my apple TV so I don't have to go over to the computer to click "export" before hopping in bed or onto the couch to watch a show.

Yes, I know this sounds silly. But this is what I have found consistently, despite several EyeTV software updates over the past year. Basically, the export process must be somehow different for auto-exporting vs. clicking that Apple TV shaped button.

. . .

other hiccups (seemingly unrelated to export speed): I'd say about 10% of the recordings are completely screwed up in some way. Like, for example, the recording will be set for NBC at 9 pm, and the recording will happen and all metadata says it was indeed the show you wanted, but then when you actually view the recording it was on the wrong channel. Weird and annoying, and I have no explanation for it. About 10% of the time.

So. . . does it work? Yes! Are there hiccups? Yes!

The hiccups are annoying but not enough for me to do something drastic like buy a Tivo or pay for cable.

I will say, though, that were I starting from scratch today, I might eschew the HD Homerun--> EyeTV --> iTunes --> Apple TV watching tact and just buy a Channel Master DVR+ for each of my two TVs. I actually have one already for one of my TVs, and it works pretty well. The down side is you need one per TV. The up side is there are no recurring fees. You don't even have to pay for the guide data, like you do for EyeTV ($20/year for TV Guide).

I concur with the above. My experience is with the HDHR3 dual tuner using a rooftop aerial capable of 100 mile+ reception. With a rotator mast I can pull in well over 70 channels! I've been using this setup with the EyeTV software for more than 6 years utilizing this current HDHR3 dual tuner and 4 or 5 previous iterations it has worked very well for me. WARNING: MAKE SURE YOUR AERIAL MAST IS WELL GROUNDED!!

HOWEVER, I agree with the hiccups mentioned above that the current EyeTV v-3.6.7 build seems to have difficulty with a small percentage of it's recordings. Mine would sometimes record a different channel than directed even if the immediate previous recording was on the same channel. The fix was to remove the check mark from the box in the Channels tab of the offending channel as the channel was not one of importance. It was a rare incident and for the most part the recordings come out correct now.

My HDHR unit does NOT do the auto-encode to 264 internally but my i7 quad-core iMac with 32 GB RAM does an admirable job encoding them overnight. My problems developed when I switched the iMac over to Yosemite (with a clean install) and updated the EyeTV software to the latest build. IT IS TERRIBLE AND UNUSABLE!!! Freezing frames, pixelation and mini lockups for several seconds at a time. Now I have to record shows using my MBP (which is still using Mountain Lion) and then dropbox the files to the iMac to encode to 264 into iTunes. Like others have said, Elgato is very slow with updating their software. Re-installing the older software made no difference so the problem lies within the changes made in Yosemite and Elgato hasn't worked out all the bugs yet. I haven't read where others are having this problem with Yosemite, so it might have something to do with old EyeTV files still residing on my drive from a previous version. I've been too busy to troubleshoot so I just use another computer to record my shows.

Like degalvin123 above, I too bought the Channel Master 75001TB DVR+ and I am extremely happy with this hardware. It is made my Echostar, the Dish Network people and it records OTA shows in H-264 with 2 simultaneous recording capability. If you want to watch a 3rd show then you would have to switch the TV input over to it's own tuner and watch the 3rd show live OTA from the TV. This will work well for our household. Watching time-shifted recordings of network broadcasts and then deleting them is what we do. We watch TV when we have the time and when we want, not when the show airs.

I will continue to use the HDHR with EyeTV software to archive some of the older shows (Gunsmoke, Adventures of Superman, Mission Impossible, etc...) and save them to and external iTunes hard drive. They are classics that I don't want to delete.

Two thumbs up for the Channel Master except for the remote, which is poorly designed with absolutely no forethought to ergonomics and layout. Buttons are all similarly shaped and poorly placed. The TiVo still has the best layout of any remote control ever developed. IMHO

__________________Good health is merely the slowest rate at which one can die.

Well that's disappointing... Auto exports are exactly what I want to get working faster. I know walking over to my computer and exporting stuff isn't that big of a burden, but when you get home from work and you just want to see what's available to watch... it's just so much nicer to be able to fire up the AppleTV see what's there, and just start watching.

Agreed.

I should say that I haven't spent a lot of time lately trouble-shooting this, and I do still get most of my auto-exported recordings showing up automatically in iTunes/Apple TV, I just haven't bothered to double-check whether they are being exported from EyeTV the "slow" or the "fast" way, since that auto-exporting either happens during the weekday when I'm away at work (for PBS kids shows), or at night when I'm asleep (for prime time network shows). In other words, my system works AT LEAST as well as it did before I had the transcoding tuner. So if that is working for you now then getting the transcoding tuner will at worst only add the capability to fast-export with a manual click.

I suspect that using an AppleScript to activate the "export to iTunes" instead of checking the "auto-export" box in EyeTV will actually use the fast-export method. But I haven't made the effort to test this. I'll try to make time to do this this weekend and report back.

Quote:

Originally Posted by DrOct

It's especially disappointing since obviously it _almost_ work totally correctly with EyeTV, so... how much work could it be for them to just get it working properly? (I'm sure the answer is a lot more than I would expect, but it's still gotta be a doable task).

Fast-exporting the pre-transcoded video to iTunes is already implemented in EyeTV (it works by manually clicking the apple-tv-shaped 720p button). I suspect that applying this existing function to EyeTV's auto-export capability would probably take less than 1 full day's labor for a single programmer at Elgato. But Elgato simply does not give a ****.

Quote:

Originally Posted by DrOct

Second question for you: Is 720p the highest resolution it'll support? I mean most of the shows that I watch are in 720p anyway so that's not a huge deal, but I have them coming through an OTA Antenna and some are in 1080i, so it'd be nice to have those come through in their native resolution if possible.

I'm not sure about the internals of EyeTV, except to say that it records all 720p and 1080i broadcasts and you can watch either in the EyeTV mac application. I presume both are in their native resolutions.

But if you are exporting to Apple TV I'm pretty sure that the device does not do interlace, so I would expect that all HD sources get exported/transcoded to 720p. In fact (and this is speculation on my part), but I would bet that if you are turning on the "heavy" transcoding feature of the HD Homerun Plus, you are effectively transcoding to H.264 at 720p for either 1080i or 720p OTA sources.

The above is a guess. I can check the resolution in the EyeTV recordings when I get home.

Mine would sometimes record a different channel than directed even if the immediate previous recording was on the same channel. The fix was to remove the check mark from the box in the Channels tab of the offending channel as the channel was not one of importance. It was a rare incident and for the most part the recordings come out correct now.

Interesting. To clarify: do you mean you disabled the channel that was getting errantly recorded, and therefore you no longer could get recordings from that now-unchecked channel? I could see how that would work. Unfortunately in most of the cases I've experienced the offending channel would be one of the other (desired) network channels. Like it would record CBS instead of NBC. Not willing to disable either of those.
Agreed the occurrence of this hiccup is rare, and shouldn't deter others from using EyeTV. Luckily nowadays there are multiple streaming opportunities for most of these network shows, so missing the occasional OTA recording is not the end of the world.

Quote:

Originally Posted by dapetrun

My problems developed when I switched the iMac over to Yosemite (with a clean install) and updated the EyeTV software to the latest build. IT IS TERRIBLE AND UNUSABLE!!! Freezing frames, pixelation and mini lockups for several seconds at a time. Now I have to record shows using my MBP (which is still using Mountain Lion) and then dropbox the files to the iMac to encode to 264 into iTunes. Like others have said, Elgato is very slow with updating their software. .

Thanks for the heads up on this. I am still on Mavericks on my MBP. Frankly, since Snow Leopard I haven't felt much need to upgrade Mac OSX. All the new features they keep advertising seem so useless and uninteresting to me. I only upgraded from Snow Leopard to Mavericks because 1.: suddenly it was free to do so, and 2: everyone said Mavericks was quite stable, which I've found to be true. There is no new feature on Yosemite that interests me, so I'll probably stick with Mavericks for a while.

Quote:

Originally Posted by dapetrun

Like degalvin123 above, I too bought the Channel Master 75001TB DVR+ and I am extremely happy with this hardware. It is made my Echostar, the Dish Network people and it records OTA shows in H-264 with 2 simultaneous recording capability. If you want to watch a 3rd show then you would have to switch the TV input over to it's own tuner and watch the 3rd show live OTA from the TV. This will work well for our household. Watching time-shifted recordings of network broadcasts and then deleting them is what we do. We watch TV when we have the time and when we want, not when the show airs.

Yes I picked up a DVR+ last Black Friday when Channel Master was selling the low-end (16 GB) version for $175 (down from the normal $250). I plugged in an old 160 GB external hard drive I had laying around and have found it quite reliable. There's something relaxing about not having to trouble-shoot all the EyeTV / Silicondust crap. I still love my system, especially since it lets both TVs with an Apple TV access the same shows without double-storage.
But getting hardware and software from three companies (SiliconDust, Elgato, and Apple) to play nicely together proved to be more of an annoyance than I wanted. It has always worked at the 90% level, but that 10% of hiccups wears on you after a while. The first couple years it was fine because I almost enjoyed the hacking/trouble-shooting. But at this point I wouldn't mind taking my mac out of the DVR loop and just letting two Channel Master DVR+'s do all the work. I would have taken that course from the start if the DVR+ existed several years ago when I cut the cable cord. But at that time the only option for OTA DVR was Tivo with its $13/month recurring cost, which I didn't want. The DVR+ with no recurring costs changes all that.

That said, frankly, as more and more streaming services come to Apple TV, recording network shows OTA becomes less and less of a benefit.
For example, I used to record the Wild Krats, Daniel Tiger, and Sesame St. for the kids OTA. But then the PBS Kids app came to Apple TV, with the most recent 3+ episodes of each of those shows available for streaming for free. So I was able to simply delete those scheduled recordings from EyeTV, and just stream-on-demand from the PBS Kids App. I recorded Downton Abbey for the wife off PBS. . . until that show started showing up to stream for free on the Apple TV's PBS app. Pretty much the only ones I still record OTA are the prime-time network shows (Modern Family, Simpsons, Parenthood, etc.) and event-level programming (Oscars, Golden-globes, State of the Union). And for the latter, my wife prefers the DVR+ since you can start watching while the broadcast is happening, instead of having to wait for the recording to finish and export to iTunes. (I would use AirParrot to mirror my Mac's screen to the Apple TV, enabling us to watch-while-recording using the EyeTV interface itself, but DVR+ enables this with less hassle and without tasking my Mac OR my local area network.)